Challenges and opportunities

Each customer channel is run by its own department with only a small Customer Experience Team working cross-functionally.

Each customer channel performs a different role in the customer experience but there is no shared understanding of the impact of procedures and behaviours in each on the end-to-end experience.

Strong commercial targets need to be balanced against important customer experience targets, particularly when it comes to selling.

Each channel presents very different operating conditions for front-line staff so different approaches to deployment are needed to communicate, coach and evaluate staff in each.

OPPORTUNITIES

Through analysing over 3 million records of customer feedback, Virgin Media discovered that simply resolving customers' issues and problems only went so far towards creating positive engagements.

The data suggested that whether issues were fixed or not, delivering a consistently positive emotional experience resonated more with customers than a functional solution alone.

Virgin Media’s Customer Experience team asked Engine to deliver a programme of design and development to support staff in delivering perfect and distinctly Virgin interactions, every time.

What we did

Using a Service Design approach Engine created behavioural frameworks for each customer sales and service channel at Virgin Media.

For each channel, we explored what the ‘perfect experience’ for customers was, the desired outcomes and how they could be measured. We looked at the implications for current systems and processes and implementation plans to roll-out the new approach.

The content of the frameworks provided the language and coaching support for front line staff to adapt to any situation and informed training content, quality measurement and the design of new systems and processes.

Given the different working environments, each channel required different supporting materials in roll-out. Call centre staff prefered paper-based materials as they principally work on screens all day. Installation technicians on the road were fed coaching tips and self assessed through PDAs. Retail staff accessed online tools through the tablets they used with customers on the shop floor.

Impact

Good colleague behaviours and improved customer service drive commercial performance.

Improvements in behaviours were responsible for 30% of the improvement in Operational NPS.

An annual financial benefit from reduction in churn equal to £1.25m was attributable to changes in frontline colleague behaviour.

Improvements in behaviour have provided an ROI of 400%.

Over 10,000 frontline staff and managers have now been trained in the Voice of Our Brand programme.

Records for transactional NPS of +20 were achieved in May 2014.

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